Da Vinci Code

Began to read the code again... and noticed something terribly clever that Dan Brown has done. At the beggening of the book, there is a page which claims everything on the page to be a "fact" and notes three things.
1) That the Priory of sion was established in 1099. That sometime in the seventies, biblotheque nationale at Paris discovered a list of Priory Grandmasters, including Newton, Vinci, and later in the novel, as we find out, Flamel.
This is wrong, the Priory was established in 1956. There is no such list in the Bibliotheque National, as can be seen by searching for "les dossiers secrets" at their online catalogue.

2) Something about the Opus Dei, which is mostly true

3) A line that says that all descriptions of art, architechture, documents and secret rituals are true.

Art: the painting near the Mona Lisa is not a Caravaggio, as seen in the prologue. Architechture : There are many inconsistancies on the locations of the buildings in Paris. Documents: As stated above, the dossiers DO NOT exist.

The joke is on the reader, because Dan Brown is very clever because the 'fact' page appears after the pages of acclaim, the note from the publishers, the dedication, the acknowledgements, and most importanltly, immideately after the name of the book appears on a blank page. This is the marking for the start of the book, (to be more precise, the work of fiction) which means everything beyond this point can only be considered to be made up by the author, or utter fiction, or to use a better phrase, utter lies. Therefore, although Dan Brown states a few things as a fact, he is allowed to lie. There is one delibrate lie, which is the invention of "les dossiers secrets", everything else can be forgiven as a mistake.

Seems like a cheap trick to pull eh?

Actually, I don't grudge Dan Brown too much. Although I still think that it is a bit unethical that the fact that he has lied is not openly known, it does add to the charm of the book. In fact, the sucess of the book can only be attributed to this.

I have read a few stories that authors have passed off as "real", Ruskin Bond in his story about the Jinn, and Michael Moorcock in what I am pretty sure is a book titled "Nomad of the time streams" says the book was a memoir by his Grandfather. All lies, but pretty convincing. I went around believing for a few days that Jinns who could stretch their hands indefinately, and had an affinity for long haired girls were real! (In my defence, I was very young back then).

I want to see how they will pull off the lie in the movies. They cannot show a pretext saying that the priory, les dossiers or the intricate web of symbology (the profession does not exit outside the code) is the truth, or they can be brought to task. I hope there is a controversy over this, because as Dan Brown rightly says in the code, "everybody loves a controversy".